When the new Confederate insurrectionists entered the Capitol on January 6 with their old battle flag, their white aggrievement, and their plan to sabotage the democratic transition of power, the American system held firm and stayed functional—barely. Now all of us are tasked with not only renewing the basic functionality of the Union but remaking it, and there’s not a moment to lose. “Build Back Better” may have sounded quaint a few months ago: Now it’s a mantra.

But how?

May I suggest that we look to playwriting for examples of reconstruction. The theatre is not a place for answers, but it is by nature a place for questions about what works and what doesn’t. If all good writing is rewriting, then all good construction is reconstruction.

Even the job title playwright denotes that the writer makes or builds their play, the way one might make or build a barrel or a wheel. Plays are constructs, and the best of them are built and rebuilt over time for optimal function.

Many wags have compared our current political players to Shakespeare as a way to read their characters, but I would prefer to focus on American plays—not simply to make pithy parallels, but to show how our theater history reflects our national history, and how playwrights and other theatre artists have struggled with that reflection, constructing and reconstructing over the decades. We own this history, whether we want to or not.

After all, Lincoln was shot while watching Our American Cousin. Although that play had an all-white cast, the post-Civil War Reconstruction was a time of minstrel shows and blackface. Stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (faithful and otherwise) played nationwide. One of the first known plays by an African American writer, The Escape, Or A Leap to Freedom, by William Wells Brown, was published in 1858 but did not receive a full production until 1871. If the Reconstruction had not been stopped in its tracks by the Compromise of 1876 and the KKK, then we might have seen more plays about the Black experience—possibly even with actual African Americans playing themselves.

It wouldn’t be until the Civil Rights Era that BIPOC artists finally constructed a stage of their own design and peopled it freely, giving voice and body to actual people of color. Productions such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), Ed Bullins’ Goin’ a Buffalo (1968), Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), and many more.

The dramatic breakthroughs didn’t only happen in cities. Using flatbed trucks as makeshift stages, playwright Luis Valdez reflected the fears and desires, not to mention the comedy, of grape pickers on strike in Delano, California, with actos such as Quinta Temporada. Perhaps for the first time, the workers saw themselves.

The progress could be slow. Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman became the first Asian American play to receive a major New York production—but not until 1972. It would be longer still before Native American playwrights could bring their stories to light on stage. But they did, with time. As Civil Rights legislation addressed our original sin of discrimination and reconstructed something closer to equity in housing, voting, and policing, American plays such as these put dark meat on the bone.

These plays have inspired new work on both stage and film ever since; they help us not just to see, but to feel what it was like to be a person of color in America in a time when discrimination still ruled. They question power. They zero in on the cracks in the monolith, and they summon drama to break through to the other side—whether in terms of race, gender, economics, or any other identifiers used to divide and monetize us.

Perhaps, in order to reconstruct for better function, we need a bit of deconstruction too—particularly when it comes to ideals and concepts. Plays don’t just mean what we think they mean today, because meaning changes over time. What signified as progressive in the 19th century may look regressive now. It’s inevitable that the progressive constructs of our moment will one day look chintzy, wrongheaded, ignorant. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to point to the painful places where America can improve to build back as best we can.

Set in 1898 in “A Deep South of the Mind,” a play of mine called Ragged Time (1996) takes on the original sins of slavery and discrimination. In a scene between Abe the Newsboy, a Jewish immigrant and self-proclaimed hero of a thousand fights and Freda, the woman he loves, who happens to be an African American prostitute trying to pass, the following dialogue occurs:

ABE: This is history. You, me. Hell, we make our own history. No matter
what happened in the past. This country is our slate—right now, right here—and we get to rub it clean. (a fighting pose) I’m the slate. And look at me now! Abe the Newsboy!
FREDA: (with disdain) Real clean.
ABE: I think so. I come a long way. And my kid is gonna come a long way
further. And his kid. And all the way, till we finally get to Zion. That’s what
a kid can be to folks like us. (tenderly) You done a bad t’ing. I done bad
t’ings too. But it’s got to stop. It’s got to stop! This is a free country!
FREDA: Nothing free. We both know that.
ABE: But one day it’ll be.

The “bad t’ing” here involves the sale of an abandoned Mexican boy, whom they might foster. Talk about an American nuclear family.

Plays of the New Reconstruction must not be cowed by “safetyism” and censorship. Trigger warnings are fine, but plays are about triggers—and good ones are willing to shoot. If plays can’t tell it like it is, then they lose what power they have left. Plays test us, force characters to make choices, and follow the consequences—even when things get ugly.

In America Adjacent (2019), the brilliant young Filipino American playwright Boni B. Alvarez writes about a group of expectant mothers of so-called anchor babies. Their children will receive U.S. passports, but the mothers are beginning to wonder if America is all it’s cracked up to be.

Sampaguita, a Filipina from the provinces who speaks Visayan, not Tagalog, starts her American journey with youthful curiosity, but grows disillusioned. She begins to form her own judgement about the big lie about freedom, which feels more and more like a prison:

We hide in chairs, living in low volume, pretending to America we are not here … if we are willing to endure these hardships for our children, it means our country is not as good, no?” she asks. “If our country is not so good as the U.S., that means we, Filipinos, we are unimportant compared to Americans also. … It is as if—it seems if our islands drown in the ocean tonight, the world will not be affected. Like nothing happened. This is not true for America, I don’t think.

Speaking about his play, Alvarez told the Los Angeles Times: “I’m still trying to find my place. I think that’s why my plays don’t really offer solutions or timelines. My plays just offer you things to think about, from multiple lenses.”

We may have dodged the bullet of the New Confederacy on January 6, but plays of the New Reconstruction must imagine what might have happened had the bullet hit. In 1935, as Hitler solidified his half-nelson on the neck of the German people, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, about a fictional American dictator’s rapid rise and the fall of democracy as we know it. No wonder the novel, and the play it became in 1936, have received renewed attention in the last five years.

The ancients desired catharsis in their staged tragedies so that they might cleanse and purify their minds and hearts, and thus renew, restore, and rebuild their human selves. Catharsis demands purgation. As in Lincoln’s time and during the Civil Rights Movement, we have reached a moment that calls us not only to bind open wounds, but to disinfect them.

Congresses and presidents and courts can only do so much. Art made by us and for us may well turn out to be the best disinfectant, its basic ingredients being truth, reconciliation, and recompense. These must go together if we are to ever truly sanitize the original sin of American injustice symbolized by the Confederate battle flag. Truth is essential. Reconciliation is a choice. Recompense is long overdue.

That’s why we need writers nationwide to engage directly in our New Reconstruction. Last year at USC’s School for Dramatic Arts, the actor David Warshofsky and I created New Theatre For Right Now, an event that will take place each fall, inviting actors and writers in our Master’s of Fine Arts program to deal head-on with the problems of our immediate present—from pandemic to protest, from climate change to loneliness. This and future years will give our student artists a new palate of themes from which to choose.

Chances are good that the next generation of United Statesians will be wondering how to build back the broken aspects of the national cultural institutions we hold dear. Writers can and should do the same. As one rebuilds a corroded barrel or a busted wheel, the new work of playwrights needs to test the function and then reconstruct our sense of who we really are, how we really feel, and why the Confederate battle flag and other symbols of injustice have no place in the Capitol, or anywhere else.

If thought moves at the speed of sound, then feeling moves at the speed of light. As our political thinkers in Washington, D.C., sound out ideas post-insurrection, what feelings will inspire change in the dramas yet to be told?

The post Can Playwrights Lead the Next American Reconstruction? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I don’t say this to act as a “myth-buster”; rather, to put that moment in a more accurate context so that we might understand it better. In the years just before 1776, Americans did not consider themselves “American” in any substantive way. They regarded themselves as Britons living in America. The difference is crucial for understanding both the events that would usher in American independence and the ways we remember it.

While researching my latest book, I sought to recover this lost world on the eve of 1776. One way to recreate it was through the eyes of two brothers who played formative parts in shaping that era.

George Townshend, a high-ranking soldier and politician, and Charles Townshend, a key member of Britain’s Board of Trade, took on important roles in the British empire in the years just before the Revolution. George, a year older than his sibling, worked to create an empire of imperial might. Charles imagined an empire of commerce. In the process, the two brothers helped create an Atlantic world of migration and commerce that made American colonists the most proudly British people and autonomous in the world. Later, both would initiate reform of that Atlantic world. George would attempt to tie Ireland more closely to Britain. Charles would do exactly the same thing for the American colonies.

In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict spanning five continents, the brothers came to believe that they were living during one of history’s critical moments. The British victory over the hated French, they thought, made this a time when institutions could be shaped to sustain British liberty and bind the empire together.

Charles Townshend, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried to come up with a vision of empire that could manage, and profit, from this moment. In 1767, he introduced duties on select goods to fund an American administration that could serve as the basis for a centralized empire.

Portrait of George Townshend. Art courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It did not seem at the time to be a high-risk tax policy. Americans, after all, considered George III to be, in an expression of the period, “the best of all kings.” They reveled in their lives, liberty, and property, rights that were guaranteed to them as British subjects.

But in crafting his idea of empire, Townshend set off a backlash—not because the British subjects in America were somehow different, but because they were so similar in outlook.

Charles Townshend’s policies placed the British Americans in a bind, one that would lead to 1776. When Bostonians and others up and down America’s Atlantic coast contested Charles’ duties, they did not think they were declaring independence. Far from it. They pushed back in hopes of holding onto a loosely federated understanding of empire that would allow them to retain their traditional liberties while continuing to profit from the Atlantic trade.

In doing so, they embraced the same rationale that the Townshends employed to design empire: that only a people devoted to liberty could negotiate a world-changing moment of time. By contesting the empire Charles was championing, they would create revolution.

Empire and revolution, then, were made of the same British materials.

The leaders of this British American revolution did not reckon, at least at first, with the implications of their resistance. By contesting the measures of Charles Townshend in America (and also of his brother George to keep Ireland within the British empire), the British Americans occasioned a battle over who would rule in each society.

Both Ireland and America were deeply politicized by the Townshend Moment. In Ireland, Roman Catholics found a political voice. The same was true for poorer people in America, and even for some enslaved persons. Most troublingly, for elites in each place, was that the backlash against the Townshends had driven members of the lower social orders to violence that seemed to be increasing.

The violence was a political challenge to rulers not only in Britain, but in America. And so the British-American elites—the merchants, planters, and lawyers who were pressing for their British rights against Townshend—had to fight two conflicts: one in Parliament, and another against the people they ruled over in America.

This created a series of what I call “provincial dilemmas.” In Ireland, Protestants carefully addressed their dilemma by pushing for as much autonomy within the British system as they dared, without further infuriating Catholics who made up more than 70 percent of the population. The Irish would not make a claim for real national independence, however much they resisted what Parliament was doing.

British-American elites had more confidence. They figured that the only way they could contain the political challenges from below was to make a bid for independence. To enjoy autonomy, their liberties, and the promise of Atlantic commerce—and to remain masters of their own societies—meant that they would have to become “American.”

That transformation took a long time, and it didn’t happen in 1776. For years afterward, Americans did not quite know what it meant to be “American.” It took the actual fighting of the war against Britain for them to see each other as compatriots and to become, in some sense, a people.

The date of July 4, and the Declaration it commemorated, did not mean much until the decades following independence, when it would be resurrected as a birthday of a nation, in order to address political tensions and the uncertainties that a period of revolutionary uncertainty had unleashed.

In time, all Americans could look to the country’s Founders as the reasonably minded midwives to a new republic dedicated not to the memory of violence but to a set of ideals. These ideals—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would then become the sum total of who we are as Americans.

But, placed in the proper context, our nation’s tangled tale actually began with British statesmen like the Townshends and with a group of colonists who proudly considered themselves to be the most proper British people in the world.

The post How the Townshend Brothers Accidentally Sparked the American Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On the eve of peace, Henry Knox clearly viewed himself as an American who devoutly believed in the new nation’s founding principles. But just a few years earlier, he—along with Washington and many other Patriots who fought in the Revolution—had considered himself a loyal subject of Great Britain. Between 1775 and 1783 these new Americans had had to discard their loyalty to the only country they had ever known, attaching themselves to a new national identity.

At the same time, the families they had left at home underwent a similar process of Americanization. During the war, Knox and his wife Lucy Flucker exchanged hundreds of letters and their correspondence provides us with a rare glimpse into how men and women decided to abandon Great Britain and take the essential first step toward adopting new loyalties to the United States. Embracing their new national identity involved fundamental sacrifices of family, home, and basic beliefs. The couple, whose reasons for ultimately rejecting Britain were not the same, found the process long and difficult.

Henry Knox was born in 1750 to a struggling maritime family in Boston. His father abandoned the brood when Henry was just nine, but young Knox nevertheless grew up with a craving for knowledge and a knack for reading, especially books in military science, and he secured an apprenticeship in a Boston bookstore. On his 21st birthday in 1771 he opened his own shop, naming it the London Book Store to honor the British Empire’s great capital.

Lucy Waldo Flucker entered the store the following year. Six years Henry’s junior, Lucy possessed a formidable personality, a quick mind, an excellent education, and strong opinions, which she rarely hesitated to share with others. She also belonged to an exalted Boston family. Her grandfather, General Samuel Waldo, was a military hero and a successful land speculator. Her father, Thomas Flucker, was a wealthy merchant and a high-ranking crown official in Massachusetts. Her brother, also named Thomas, held a captain’s commission in the regular army and served in British Antigua. Lucy could not have helped but feel pride in an empire that had given her family so much.

After they met, the couple began a passionate courtship. Deeply attracted to one another, 16-year-old Lucy and 22-year-old Henry found they had much in common, including a great love of books, literature, and conversation. After the pair married in June 1774, they expected to spend the rest of their days together as well as to remain faithful subjects of their monarch. During the time of their courtship and marriage, the imperial crisis rapidly escalated in America, but Henry kept his political cards close to his vest. Consequently, he never joined one of Boston’s prewar Whig associations, possibly because many of his store’s customers were British officials and American Tories.

However, when the Revolution began the couple had to choose sides. Shortly after April 1775, they slipped out of the city and Henry joined the assembling Continental Army. He experienced a meteoric rise during the Revolution’s first year, earning command of the army’s artillery branch. In the winter of 1775-76, Knox led a remarkable trek that carried captured British guns and mortars from New York’s Fort Ticonderoga, through the Berkshire Mountains and to the American forces besieging Boston—forcing the British to evacuate and gaining the colonies their first great victory.

Portrait of Henry Knox (after 1783), by Charles Peale Polk, copy after Charles Willson Peale. Art courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Even then, as their letters show, Henry and Lucy viewed the rebellion mainly as a momentous adventure. Little American blood had yet been shed, and the goal of most colonials was reconciliation. Still a loyal British-American, young Knox desired the same cherished liberties and respect enjoyed by His Majesty’s faithful subjects in the British Isles.

Like many ambitious Continental officers, he wanted to be considered a gentleman of honor. Early in the war, Knox spoke of enemy officers with great esteem—and he prized their respect in return. In a letter to Lucy in the summer of 1775, he wrote that a British officer parleying with colonial sentries near Boston’s Neck lamented “this unatural [sic] breach,” wishing only “to Heal” the wounds felt by both aggrieved parties. When recently captured British naval officers dined with General Washington, Knox noted how the men had respectfully presented themselves at dinner: the “one Lieut., one Doctor, one master & four midshipmen” had arrived dressed as “handsome Genteel looking men”; therefore, they too “were dispos’d of Genteely” in return. Knox scrupulously remarked whenever the British treated Continental officers as equals. He still viewed the British as national-kinsmen with whom he wished to put things right.

Lucy Knox’s traditional loyalties early in the war didn’t go to the empire per se, but to her family, all of whom had sided with the Crown. She wrote frequently to her parents throughout the Boston siege, sending letters across hostile lines. By spring 1776, she wrote Henry that she knew that her family had evacuated with the British, but little more. Worried for their well-being, she listened avidly for rumors regarding their whereabouts. That July, as the main armies gathered around New York City, Lucy heard that her father had gone to London and her mother to Halifax—and that her eldest sister, Hannah, might be with the British army encamped on Staten Island. Lucy worried that Hannah’s husband, British Captain James Urquhart, was stationed elsewhere. If Hannah was alone, Lucy wrote, Henry must bring her into American lines under a flag of truce, so that the two sisters could be reunited. Hannah would most certainly do the same for her, Lucy told her husband.

As the war’s costs escalated, however, the couple began to cast off their prewar loyalties. Knox supported the Declaration of Independence when it was announced, but his letters to Lucy indicate that he finally discarded his British attachments during the arduous New York-New Jersey campaign of 1776-77, when the Continental Army suffered repeated defeats and American civilians endured depredations at the hands of enemy redcoats. The season’s fighting famously ended with Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton.

Knox’s letters to Lucy during the campaign focused on the army’s movements and his safety. Thus, he didn’t dwell on Great Britain and the empire’s place in America. Afterwards, though, as Knox looked back on the months of hard fighting, it became clear that something had changed. Writing Lucy in January 1777 from winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, he began to express disdain for the British. Characterizing the war as “a Contest of Virtue with vice,” he insisted, “My Country demands my poor pittance … to rescue her from Barbarity, Tyranny, & every misery consequent to uncheck’d power.” The British had, among other crimes, sent vile “Hessians … to desolate & lay Waste [to] this Country, almost the only Country on earth … [to] have even the appearance of Liberty.”

Knox continued in this vein into the spring—“[W]e are contending with a people cruel indeed,” he wrote Lucy in April, whose “one Characteristick of Greatness” was “a total debauch of morals.” But at the same time, an attachment to the new United States started to emerge in his letters. Though frustrated that more Americans had not joined the army, Knox confidently told his wife, “I have the Most enthusiastic assurance of mind that it is the Will of high Heaven that America should be great.”

The hard war of 1776-77 had turned Henry against his British identity. In the same months, hard treatment at the hands of her own family forced Lucy to sever her loyalties to the past. Lucy wrote to Henry in Morristown how she felt “sick at heart [and] low spirited.” She especially lamented that her family had abandoned her. “[W]hen I reflect,” she unburdened herself, “that I have a father and a mother, sisters, and a Brother, and yet I am this poor neglected thing, I cannot bear it.”

Later that spring, as Lucy and her one-year-old daughter prepared for hazardous smallpox inoculations, she attempted once more to contact her kin. Hearing new rumors that her sister Hannah had gone to Halifax, Lucy wrote again. She claimed that she still felt “tender affection” for them all, but she reminded Hannah of “the great neglect with which I think I have been treated both by you and my dear Mama.”

Describing the Revolution as a “horrid” war, pitting “Brother against Brother, and the parent against the child,” Lucy begged for news of them and closed with prayers for peace—but the war’s damage was manifest. In the letter’s draft (which is all that survives), Lucy made several deletions that poignantly illustrate the ways she was severing ties to her former life. She originally wrote, for instance, of her “love” for her parents, but struck out the word—and the sentiment—from the missive’s final version. She deleted a sentence explaining how the Knoxes’ little daughter was “very much like her gran mama.” Finally, Lucy referred to Hannah as merely “my Sister,” instead of “my dear sister,” as in the first draft. Lucy’s missive, like her earlier ones, went unanswered, and she didn’t attempt to write her sister again during the war.

Lucy and her daughter survived their smallpox inoculations, and reunited with Henry. But Lucy never saw her Loyalist family again and she only rarely discussed them in the couple’s later correspondence. Like her husband—who ended the war as a major-general and served as President Washington’s first Secretary of War—Lucy Knox looked to the future and toward a new life, one bound together by her young family and loyalty to an independent American nation.

The post The Revolutionary War Couple Who Shed Their British Loyalty—One Letter at a Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Before Hamilton reached his political apotheosis in George Washington’s cabinet, he immigrated to the mainland North American colonies from Nevis, an island in the British West Indies. Like his contemporaries Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton was a British subject, but upon arrival in New Jersey in 1772, he lacked their wealth, familial lineage, elite status, and American roots. In short, he was an outsider—a “Bastard Bratt of a Scotch Pedlar,” as John Adams described him.

Eventually, Hamilton would leverage a combination of service in the Revolutionary War, a strategic marriage into an old New York family, and the professional legitimacy of a successful law practice to transform himself into a member of a new generation of elite Americans.

Following the battle of Yorktown in October 1781, Hamilton returned to his pregnant wife Elizabeth in Albany, New York and began preparing for admission to the New York bar. He was an astonishingly quick study; with only a few months of preparation behind him, Hamilton was fully admitted to practice in New York’s Supreme Court by October 1782. By 1783, Hamilton had qualified to practice in the Court of Chancery as well. Just as Hamilton joined the ranks of New York lawyers, the postwar legal tensions between Patriots and Loyalists intensified.

Hamilton threw himself into the political and legal thick of this battle. During and immediately after the Revolutionary War, New Yorkers were engaged in a bitter struggle to distinguish worthy insiders (Patriots) from traitorous outsiders (Loyalists). The stakes were high; wartime destruction of property, bloodshed, and the lengthy British occupation of New York City made reconciliation a hard sell among New Yorkers divided by their wartime loyalties.

Not only did Patriot New Yorkers liken British-sympathizers in their midst to an “impure nest of Vipers,” but the people of New York also backed legislative efforts to punish and exclude Loyalists by preventing them from enjoying the rights and liberties granted through law and citizenship.

Through a trio of particularly vituperative laws—the Citation, Trespass, and Confiscation Acts—the state denied Loyalists their right to collect debts owed to them as well as their procedural due process rights (including the right to appeal to higher courts, and to wage appropriate legal defenses in court). The state also attainted British sympathizers (thereby declaring them treasonous) and confiscated their property.

And so in New York, a revolution fought under the banner of expunging monarchical tyranny resulted in a new form of tyranny: the tyranny of the majority over a powerless, unpopular minority.

By this time—the mid-1780s—Hamilton, having achieved his own insider status, used this newly acquired position and profession to fight against the vindictive wrongs inflicted on Loyalists. The state of New York considered British-sympathizing men and women to be foreign usurpers—no matter that some of them considered themselves to be, in the wake of war, American citizens and no longer British subjects.

Hamilton used the tools of the common law to fight the harshness of New York’s trio of anti-Loyalist statutes. He pursued novel defense strategies in court, appealed to a higher law (the law of nature) over state statute, petitioned the legislature for mercy, exploited legal technicalities, and tried to reason with the people of New York. While publishing essays under the pseudonym Phocion, Hamilton implored New Yorkers to stop punishing Loyalists. He explained that Patriots were setting an insidious precedent through the state’s treatment of Loyalists by dismantling the rights of an unpopular minority.

And if this were allowed today, then what would stop the state from dismantling the rights of Patriots tomorrow?

Eventually, Hamilton’s legal defense of the New York Loyalists was successful. Through state court decisions and changes to New York state statutes (as well as the eventual ratification of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights), the property and procedural rights of all New Yorkers, no matter their wartime sympathies, were better secured. Almost a century later, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution continued the work of protecting and preserving the rights of American citizens as well as any person (including non-citizens) in the United States.

Today, Hamilton’s experience defending Loyalists in New York should remind us of two different things. First, for centuries American “insiders” have cleverly and cruelly used law as a tool to exclude, punish, and justify their fears of “outsiders.” And, second, that the law can be used, as Hamilton employed it in his post-war practice, to protect even an unpopular few from a powerful majority.

Hamilton did not resolve the persistent tension at the heart of the American experiment in self-government: Should the popular will in our democracy trump the protections of transcendent law grounded in nature, due process, and constitutional principles? But he set an early precedent that defined the country. To be American is to keep up the fight for certain transcendent principles so that they will always prevail over the prejudices of any era.

The post How Alexander Hamilton Fought the Tyranny of the Majority appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The practice of naming places for Lafayette began even before the Revolutionary War officially ended. On May 15, 1783—four months before the Treaty of Paris was signed—the General Assembly of North Carolina gave the name Fayetteville to a new town in Cumberland County, making it the first city in the United States to honor the Marquis. As the United States expanded west and residents of Fayetteville followed the frontier, they brought the town’s name with them. Fayetteville, Tennessee, adopted the name in 1810, and Fayetteville, Arkansas took it in 1829. In 1846 the French name moved to the other side of the continent when Lafayette, Oregon was founded by a settler who had relocated from Lafayette, Indiana.

Lafayette, Indiana had adopted the name in 1825—a year when the United States was in the grip of Lafayette-mania. Between July 1824 and September 1825, the beloved Frenchman completed a triumphal tour of all 24 states in the Union at the invitation of President James Monroe. Politicians burnished their patriotic credentials by appearing alongside the Nation’s Guest, and municipalities vied to outdo their neighbors with parades, dances, and dinners in his honor. Men, women, and children turned out in unprecedented numbers to catch a glimpse of Lafayette—a link to the nation’s founding—and entrepreneurs made a tidy profit selling commemorative memorabilia (evening gloves, baby shoes, loaves of bread) emblazoned with Lafayette’s name or face. As Lafayette toured the country, more and more localities began naming stretches of land in his honor. President’s Park, facing the White House, was re-christened Lafayette Square in 1824. Place Gravier in New Orleans, Louisiana became Lafayette Square in 1825.

Lafayette Hose Company Cape, mid-19th century. Image courtesy of Division of Home and Community Life, National Museum of American History.

In the years that followed, memories of the triumphal tour inspired dozens of towns, parks, and schools to adopt names including Lafayette, La Grange (Lafayette’s chateau, about 30 miles east of Paris), and variations on the theme. In Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, local lore has it that an attorney named James Madison Porter was among the throng welcoming Lafayette to Philadelphia in 1824. During a brief conversation with the general, Porter had been moved to learn that the aging hero remembered Porter’s father and uncle as “good soldiers” during the Revolutionary War. Two years later, when Porter spearheaded the establishment of a college in Easton, Pennsylvania, the institution took the name Lafayette College.

When the United States came to the aid of France by entering World War I, another round of Lafayette commemorations began. In 1916 a group of American pilots fighting in the French Air Service dubbed themselves the Lafayette Escadrille. Most famously, perhaps, on July 4, 1917, Colonel Charles E. Stanton made it clear that the United States was repaying its revolutionary-era debt when he stood at Lafayette’s graveside in Paris’s Picpus Cemetery and declared “Lafayette, we are here!”

As the 20th century wore on, Lafayette’s name spread into nearly every corner of American culture. Lafayette cars were manufactured in Indiana in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1970, a basset hound named Lafayette appeared in the animated Disney film The Aristocats. And, on a 2015 visit to George Washington’s Mount Vernon, I bought French fries at the Lafayette Grill.

Thousands of French soldiers and sailors fought and died in the American Revolution, so why is Lafayette the first French name on every American tongue? His high rank and great wealth certainly had something to do with it: Lafayette was living, breathing evidence that the old European order had faith in a young country on the other side of the Atlantic. More important, though, might have been his earnest enthusiasm for the American cause and his unflagging determination to contribute to its success.

Lafayette Motors Co. radiator emblem, ca 1921. Image courtesy of Division of Work and Industry, National Museum of American History.

It all started on June 13, 1777, when the 19-year-old Lafayette reached North Island, South Carolina with some 20 officers and servants on a ship he had optimistically christened the Victoire—Victory. Lafayette had never seen a day of battlefield action and knew no English before he set sail, but he came filled with a burning desire to help 13 American colonies wrest their freedom from Great Britain, France’s age-old enemy.

Explaining his actions in a shipboard letter to the wife he had left in Paris, Lafayette described himself as a “defender of this freedom which I venerate” and insisted that “the happiness of America is closely tied to that of humanity.” More practical motivations had also influenced his thinking. Hailing from a line of men who fought and died for their country, Lafayette had dreamed of martial glory since childhood. But the French army quashed his hopes in 1776 when a wave of reforms removed from active duty hundreds of young officers who, like Lafayette, had risen through the ranks thanks to money and connections. Fighting under George Washington in the Continental Army represented a second chance.

Lafayette had been granted the rank of Major General by Silas Deane, one of Congress’s envoys to France, and expected to be awarded a command upon his arrival. But Congress and Washington hesitated; surely the rank was meant to be honorary. They had grown wary of the French officers who had been sailing across the Atlantic to join the American army. Although many were fine soldiers, some were mercenaries or troublemakers who had been driven from the French army. Others expressed open disdain for the American military.

Lady’s glove with a portrait of Lafayette, 1825. Image courtesy of Division of Political History, National Museum of American History.

On July 27, 1777, the same day that Lafayette and his shipmates reached Philadelphia, Washington wrote a letter from Morristown, New Jersey complaining of the influx of Frenchmen: “Almost every one of them,” he wrote, harbored “immoderate expectations” and became “importunate for offices they have no right to look for.” Massachusetts Congressman James Lovell was even more pointed in his criticism, explaining to Lafayette’s group that Deane had recruited no useful men in France, but only “some so-called engineers … and some useless artillerymen.”

America would soon learn that Lafayette was an exception. Of the officers who arrived on the Victoire, he was the only one invited to stay, with Congress evidently persuaded of his value by a letter from Silas Deane that praised not only Lafayette’s uncommon “zeal,” but also his “noble lineage, his connections, the high dignities exercised by his family at this Court, his ample possessions in the Kingdom, his personal worth, his celebrity.” As it happened, Lafayette was an exceptionally wealthy orphan who had allied himself with one of the most influential families at the French court when he married Adrienne de Noailles in 1774. What he lacked in experience he made up in funds and influence. It helped that Lafayette was immensely likeable: His straightforward demeanor and self-deprecating sense of humor sometimes rendered him out-of-place in the perfumed halls of Versailles, but they endeared him to Americans. If he was willing to forego a salary, he would be welcomed in the army.

Lafayette joined Washington’s closest circle of officers and was one of more than 10,000 American troops who awoke on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River on the morning of September 11, 1777, awaiting a British attack. The Battle of Brandywine—Lafayette’s first—would end in a loss for the Americans, but it inaugurated the young Frenchman’s lasting American celebrity. In an account of the battle written that night, Washington mentioned the names of just two officers, reporting that “the Marquis de Lafayette was wounded in the leg, and General Woodford in the hand.” In the weeks that followed, as Lafayette was nursed back to health by the Moravian Brethren of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Washington’s letter made its way into patriot newspapers throughout the colonies. Lafayette was introduced to the American people as the French aristocrat who had shed blood on behalf of their freedom.

Thanks to careful guidance from Washington, who gently shepherded Lafayette through positions of increasing responsibility, the young man’s skills as a leader increased. In March of 1778 Lafayette put his enthusiasm for the American cause and his personable disposition to use in recruiting a group of Oneida men to fight under his command. And on June 28 his quick thinking was instrumental in salvaging a narrow victory at the Battle of Monmouth after General Charles Lee gave a disastrous order to retreat. Even more significant were the contributions Lafayette made away from the field of action. Taking every opportunity to write letters to France praising the Americans, and assuring Americans at every turn that France was on their side, Lafayette became the unofficial spokesperson for the French-American alliance.

Equestrian statue of Lafayette. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When France pledged open support for the Americans by signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Lafayette rightly took some of the credit. Hoping to be named commander of the French troops who would soon be sailing to the New World, Lafayette returned home to make his case. Although that role went to the far more senior Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau (1725-1807), Lafayette carried the news to Washington that guns, ships, and men would soon be on the way. Taking up an American command once more, Lafayette played leading roles in the Virginia campaign of 1781 and in the Siege of Yorktown that marked the last major hostilities of the American Revolution.

Lafayette returned to a political career in France, but throughout the 1780s he devoted himself to furthering America’s political and commercial interests. Sometimes working with America’s emissaries in France and sometimes acting on his own accord, Lafayette lobbied for a diplomatic post with the American government, advocated for favorable trading relations between France and the United States, and generally did what he could to help the young nation conquer the herculean task of establishing a new system of government while digging out from crushing debt. It was also important to him that the people of the United States learn of his efforts; as he put it in a 1783 letter to the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs Robert R. Livingston, “I have a great value for my American popularity.”

Around the world, Lafayette’s name became synonymous with liberty. In France, where the Revolution and Napoleon’s reign would tear society asunder, his reputation suffered ups and downs over the course of his long life. Things were different in the United States, though, in the 1820s and today. Thanks to the scores of places that bear his name, his American popularity lives on. As Lin-Manuel Miranda put it in his 2015 hit musical Hamilton, Lafayette remains “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman.”

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Many Americans today think of their colonial history as a purely British affair. But it was Spain that established the earliest European settlement in America in 1508, a century before the English arrived at Jamestown. By 1535, Spain had created the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which would encompass Florida, much of the American Southwest, and Mexico. France established its own American colonies in Canada and Louisiana at about the same time. Over the next two centuries, the global clashes between the three European imperial powers resulted in France and Spain losing a substantial part of their holdings. So in 1776, when the American colonists rebelled, Spain and France saw an opportunity to regain lost ground.

Both nations had fared poorly against the ascendant British Empire (aided by its North American colonists) in the Seven Years’ War two decades earlier. That conflict had cost France its Canadian territory, and cost Spain Florida (though the French conceded Louisiana to Spain as part of the peace settlement).

On the eve of American independence, the two Catholic monarchies were allied by the Bourbon Family Compact—Spanish King Carlos III and French King Louis XVI were cousins—and together they secretly began rebuilding their navies to create a single, united fleet that could defeat the British and recapture lost domains. The Spanish governor of Louisiana, Luis de Unzaga, sent a steady stream of observers and spies from his capital at New Orleans to New York and Philadelphia to learn whether the British mismanagement of the colonists would lead to war. They soon found that the answer was “yes.”

Spanish diplomat Diego de Gardoqui.

Even before fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in 1775, Spain was providing arms and munitions to the American insurgents. The Bilbao merchant Diego de Gardoqui, who had a long relationship with cod brokers in Marblehead and Salem, smuggled shiploads of muskets, shoes, uniforms, blankets, and gunpowder to New England. From New Orleans, Unzaga sent 10,000 pounds of much-needed gunpowder to the colonial troops at Fort Pitt (today’s Pittsburgh) to fend off British threats in the Western Theater. Madrid also sent today’s equivalent of a half-billion dollars to France in order to fund another arms smuggling operation to the United States. Americans desperately needed this materiel aid, for they had begun the war stunningly incapable of fending for itself. They had no navy, little in the way of artillery, and a ragtag army and militia that were bereft of guns and even of gunpowder. The colonists knew that without the help of France and Spain, they could not hope to prevail against the superior British army and navy.

When the Continental Congress assigned to him the task of writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson understood he was inviting France and Spain to join America in the fight against Great Britain. The Americans knew that neither France nor Spain would take sides in a British civil war. Even John Adams admitted that “foreign powers could not be expected to acknowledge us, till we had acknowledged ourselves … as an independent nation.” When the Declaration arrived in Europe in late 1776, France and Spain were still rebuilding their navies and could not yet go to war. It was not until after the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777 that the French fleet was ready.

When France signed its treaty of alliance with the Americans in February 1778, Spain was still not prepared for the ensuing fight. It had a treasure fleet from Peru at sea carrying the equivalent of $50 billion in silver, and until those ships were safely in port they could not risk open war with Britain. While Spain waited for its treasure fleet to return, the King’s chief minister, the Conde de Floridablanca, offered to mediate a peace between France and Britain, which would have kept Spain out of the war. His main condition was that Britain should return to Spain the strategic fortification of Gibraltar, but the British king refused, leading later historians to note caustically that Britain sacrificed America for Gibraltar (which it still controls). With the Spanish treasure fleet home by the end of the year, in early 1779 Spain joined France in the fight. Their combined navies—the Bourbon Armada—outnumbered the British and challenged them everywhere in the world.

The entry of Spain alongside France fundamentally changed the war from a regional clash to a global conflict. Although Spain never formally allied with the United States as France did, it made American independence a condition for Britain’s surrender. The British navy and army were now spread ever thinner to face an escalating number of threats. The first action by the Bourbon Armada was an attempted invasion of Britain itself, which in the end was called off because a deadly dysentery epidemic decimated the crews. Still, it required the British admirals to beef up the Channel Fleet at the expense of more ships for America. Next, Spain laid siege to Gibraltar and threatened the British hold on the Mediterranean island of Minorca, further depleting Royal Navy resources.

Spanish statesman and soldier Bernardo de Gálvez.

Back in New Orleans, the new governor of Louisiana, the young but battle-hardened Bernardo de Gálvez, put his troops on a war footing to drive the British from Florida. With a multinational army that included several American soldiers, Gálvez struck quickly, capturing Baton Rouge and Natchez in less than a month during the summer of 1779. The following spring he captured Mobile in just three days. However, the prize he sought—the capture of the British capital at Pensacola—was placed temporarily out of reach when a massive hurricane scattered the invasion fleet under José Solano. But the damage was quickly repaired and from February to May 1781, Gálvez and Solano, at the head of almost 20,000 soldiers and sailors, besieged Pensacola. When a fortuitous shot from a Spanish howitzer detonated a British ammunition magazine, Gálvez’s forces quickly overran the British stronghold and forced its commander to surrender all of West Florida.

The British surrender of West Florida in May 1781 came at the most opportune moment. At just that time, a major French expedition under the Comte de Grasse had arrived in the West Indies, where he received word from General Rochambeau in New York that he and George Washington urgently needed his support in a campaign against Lord Cornwallis around the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. De Grasse had no time to waste, but he could not leave the important French sugar colonies in the West Indies unguarded. Fortunately, with Britain out of West Florida, the Gulf of Mexico was now firmly under Spanish control. So, the Spanish navy spared a few ships to guard the French islands while the French sortied the entire fleet north to meet the British.

When the British fleet arrived off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay just days later, de Grasse’s larger fleet was able to drive them off and prevent them from reinforcing or evacuating Cornwallis at Yorktown; had de Grasse left some ships back in the West Indies, he might not have been so successful. Within a month, French and American troops had besieged Yorktown and forced Cornwallis to surrender on October 19, 1781.

When the peace treaties were finally signed in 1783, the British acknowledged American independence while ceding to Spain almost all of the territory it wanted – Florida and Minorca in particular – though Gibraltar continued to elude its grasp.

And for the new American republic, having a friendly Spain on its southern border instead of a potentially hostile Britain meant that its hold on the region was now secure.

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Or you can go for the American history. Those who know of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham—fought September 13, 1759 on a plain named for the early French settler Abraham Martin—often remember it as a fight between a French army commanded by Lieutenant General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and a British army commanded by Major General James Wolfe. But few know that this battle helped to make the American Revolution possible.

About one-third of Major General Wolfe’s army had been recruited in the American colonies. Two-thirds of the ships that carried his army up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec had been chartered in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of New England sailors had temporarily joined the Royal Navy to take part in the Quebec campaign.

Visit the National Battlefields Park inside the city and you can walk over the ground where American soldiers fought in 1759. Despite its name, the park—Quebec’s equivalent of Central Park—is well known these days as a recreational area, nature preserve, and outdoor concert venue, rather than as a historic site.

James Wolfe, 1727-1759.

But at National Battlefields Park, you can follow in the footsteps of Wolfe’s advance guard that climbed the cliffs lining the St. Lawrence River by walking up the Plains of Abraham Trail. Walk eastward until you reach the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (the Quebec National Fine Arts Museum) and you’re standing at the south end of Wolfe’s line.

Wolfe’s 4,500 British and American soldiers stood there as Montcalm’s army of 3,500 charged across the plains. Wolfe’s disciplined force held their formation and waited for the French to come within range. Montcalm’s army, composed of an uneasy mix of French regulars and Canadian militia, broke apart as a rapid advance over rough ground disrupted its formation and the militia opened fire prematurely, then paused to reload. A series of volleys by Britons and Americans firing flintlock muskets broke the French army and threw Montcalm’s troops into headlong retreat.

By European standards, the battle had been a minor encounter between small bodies of troops. (In the European theatre of the Seven Years’ War, 36,000 Prussians—allied to the British—had defeated 66,000 Austrians—allied to the French—at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757.) Wolfe’s army lost 71 killed, 591 wounded, and three missing; the French had about 600 killed, wounded, and missing. But when the black powder smoke had cleared, a major obstacle to American independence had been eliminated.

That obstacle? The French.

By 1759, the original 13 colonies were potential independent states. They had their own governments, run by local elites and financed by local revenues. And on occasion they organized their own armies and fleets and sent them off to war. New England had sent out expeditions that had besieged Quebec in 1690 and captured Acadia in 1710 and Louisbourg in 1744.

A military plan shows frontline positions of the British and French during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham on Sept. 13, 1759.

But for as long as the French held Canada, independence was out of the question. The British and Americans perceived the French and their Native American allies as a major threat. In wartime, French-Native American war parties raided the American frontier with impunity while privateers from Louisbourg preyed on American shipping. French outposts like Fort Niagara, Detroit, and Louisiana hemmed in the 13 colonies, preventing them from expanding to the west. Americans looked to the Royal Navy and British army to defend the colonies against French aggression.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham changed all that. A few days after the battle, Quebec surrendered after a brief siege. A year later, following three British-American invasions that converged on Montreal, the rest of Canada capitulated. Now in British hands, Canada no longer posed a threat.

So when the British parliament decided to tax the American colonies, there was nothing to stop British colonials from rising up to fight—first for their rights as Englishmen, then for their freedom as Americans. British soldiers who served at the Plains of Abraham ended up on both sides of the American Revolution. William Howe, who led Wolfe’s advance guard during the landing at Quebec, served as British commander-in-chief from 1775 to 1778. Richard Montgomery, one of Wolfe’s officers, joined the American rebels and returned to Quebec in 1775 as the commander of an American invasion of Canada.

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Before 1492, Aedes aegypti did not live in the Americas. It came from West Africa as part of the Columbian Exchange, probably on ships of the transatlantic slave trade. The mosquito gradually colonized those parts of the Americas that suited its feeding and breeding requirements, and for centuries served as the primary carrier for yellow fever and dengue, viruses that are cousins of Zika.

Aedes aegypti is a peculiar and fussy mosquito. It has a strong preference for human blood—rare but not unique among mosquitoes—which makes it an efficient spreader of human disease. It lays its eggs in artificial water containers such as pots, cans, barrels, wells, or cisterns. This preference for human activities distinguishes it from the thousands of other mosquito species. Aedes aegypti is, in effect, a domesticated animal.

Together these mosquitoes and their fevers decided the fate of empires. In 1697, the kingdom of Scotland attempted to establish a trading colony on the Caribbean shore of Panama. New Caledonia was intended to position Scots to take advantage of Pacific and Atlantic trade networks. A large share of the liquid capital of Scotland and 2,500 eager volunteers went into the effort. Within two years, however, some 70 percent of the Scots were dead of “fever.” The Scots’ immune systems were unprepared for yellow fever, dengue, and malaria—any or all of which might have attacked them—and they paid the price. So did Scotland, which in 1707 accepted union with England partly to pay debts incurred by the disaster.

These tiny mosquitoes and their tinier viruses helped to undermine the grand plans of empires in the Americas for the next century. In 1763, France had just lost Canada in war to Britain and hoped to regain its position in the Americas with a new colony in what is now French Guiana. Some 11,000 hopeful souls were recruited from France and elsewhere in Europe. Like the hapless Scots, their immune systems had no previous experience of yellow fever or dengue (and in most cases none of malaria either). They too sailed into prime Aedes habitat. Within 18 months, 85 to 90 percent of them had died from disease, with yellow fever playing the largest role.

The British also lost thousands of troops to mosquito-borne fevers. They tried to take the Spanish strongholds of Cartegena (Colombia) and Santiago de Cuba in 1741 and ’42, but gave up after diseases killed most of their soldiers. Twenty years later, in another war, yellow fever proved a disaster when they finally took Havana. The lexicographer and man of letters Samuel Johnson wrote, “May my country never be cursed with another such conquest!” At the subsequent peace conference, Britain eagerly handed Havana back to Spain.

By the end of the 18th century, the mosquitoes were not just intervening in imperial schemes; they were helping the Americas win their liberty. Yellow fever and malaria ravaged European armies sent to prevent revolution in what is now Haiti and Venezuela, leading to the creation of independent countries.

Even the U.S. owes its independence in part to mosquitoes and malaria. In 1780, the southern colonies, a region with widespread malaria, became a decisive theater in the American Revolution. British troops had almost no experience with malaria, and thus no resistance to it. American militiamen and much of the Continental Army, had grown up in the South and faced malaria every summer of their lives. So in the summer of 1780, the British Army hosted its own malaria epidemic, which was particularly intense in the South Carolina low country. At times, half the British Army was too sick to move. No one knew that mosquitoes carried malaria, and the British did not have the means to combat it.

In 1781, the British commander in the South, Lord Cornwallis, decided to move his army north into the hills of Virginia in order to avoid “the fatal sickness which so nearly ruined the army” the summer before. His superiors, however, ordered him to move to the tidewater, and so in June, Cornwallis dug in at Yorktown.

In the warm months, mosquitoes (including a malaria vector species called Anopheles quadrimaculatus) started to bite and by late summer of 1781, malaria had taken hold of his army once again. Some 51 percent of his men were too sick to stand duty, unable to conduct the counter-siege operations that Cornwallis knew were required. American and French forces penned the troops in until Cornwallis surrendered in October, which in effect decided the outcome of the American Revolution.

The Continental Army and its French allies stayed healthy until the surrender, mainly because they had only recently arrived in Virginia (from New England) and malaria had not had time to do its worst. (Many of them were also resistant from prior experience with malaria). Thus, mosquitoes and malaria helped win American independence.

Mosquitoes only lost their political importance after medical researchers realized that they were spreading the fevers. The first to publish the idea that Aedes aegypti could carry yellow fever was a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay. U.S. military doctors led by Walter Reed confirmed Finlay’s hypothesis. Armed with this knowledge, when the U.S. Army occupied Cuba (after 1898) and Panama (after 1903) they made life miserable for Aedes aegypti—covering up water containers and putting a drop of kerosene into those without covers. Within a couple of years, mosquito control had banished yellow fever from Cuba and Panama’s Canal Zone.

Over the next 70 years or so, mosquito control acquired even more weapons. Insecticides, such as DDT—brought to bear in the 1940s—proved deadly to all mosquitoes (and many other creatures too). Aedes aegypti, because of its fondness for human settlements, fell victim to spraying campaigns more easily than did most other mosquitoes.

But Aedes aegypti control proved too successful for its own good. Once the mosquito populations had fallen drastically and the risk of yellow fever and dengue diminished, the logic of paying for continued mosquito control weakened. Budgets were redirected away from mosquito control all over the Americas. On top of that, the nasty side effects of DDT and other insecticides became well known in the 1960s.

Had the Zika virus come to the Americas in the 1930s or 1950s, its prospects would have been poor—Aedes aegypti was under control. But since the 1980s, Aedes aegypti has made a dramatic comeback in the Americas. While the main reason is the lapse in mosquito control, another reason is the warming climate, which slowly extends the range of the mosquito. Today, Zika’s chances of spreading widely among human populations via Aedes aegypti are far greater. And it will have help from Aedes albopictus, another mosquito capable of transmitting the virus, which arrived from East Asia in the 1980s. Aedes albopictus has a wider range in the U.S. than Aedes aegypti and potentially could spread Zika to more northerly states. Fortunately it is less efficient as a disease vector.

Combatting Zika will require mosquito control, and the political difficulty that arouses shows a defiant aspect of the American character to which mosquitoes and malaria gave free rein. Malaria may have helped Americans win the revolution in 1780-81, but their descendants cherish their liberty and say, in effect, “don’t tread on me” when told to cover water containers. Any attempt to spray pesticides in our democracy quickly excites opposition. Eventually, perhaps, a vaccine will sideline Zika, but until then these coming summers give the virus a chance to run amok and mosquitoes to again make history.

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The musical follows an old playbook that divides the founders into heroes and villains. This started after the Revolution when Charles Willson Peale began compiling portraits of “Revolutionary Patriots” and displayed them in his renowned Philadelphia Museum. In 1818, a Russian diplomat and artist, Pavel Petrovich Svinin, observed that “every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints.” In death, Washington figuratively became a god, when an artist attached his iconic face and head to a classic pose of Jesus sitting on a cloud and ascending into heaven. The impulse to glorify the founders is still with us. They were romanticized in the silent film era, and in innumerable, hokey Hollywood movies since. The Patriots awed New York theater critics during World War II, and 1776 rocked Broadway in 1969, with Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin singing and dancing their way to independence. Have we already forgotten HBO’s gushing tribute, John Adams?

“The Apotheosis of Washington,” an 1800 engraving of the first U.S. President by David Edwin.

 
The drama of the founders has overtaken the reality. In the undergraduate seminar I teach, “America’s Founding Myths,” I ask my students to identify the life masks of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, produced in 1825, which is as close as we can come to capturing their likenesses. None of my students recognized them. Why? They are old. Adams is jowly and bald. There isn’t an ounce of glamor in these unflattering busts. The reason that Hamilton is so popular is that the theatergoer is treated to vigorous youth, brazen sex appeal, macho brashness, capped by so-called genius—all wrapped up in a loving and whimsical portrait of a Hamilton who “tells it like it is” in the pounding, nonstop rhythms of hip hop. Which guy do you want to be? A shrunken Jefferson, or the dashing and daring Hamilton who, like Peter Pan, never appears to grow up?

No one watching Hamilton will want to be Burr, one of the most interesting figures of early American history. Leslie Odom, Jr., who plays Burr, has a lovely voice, but his portrayal echoes a familiar slur: the opportunist. Or to use Hamilton’s favorite insult of Burr (and others): a “cunning” man, who carries himself with aristocratic airs. In Hamilton, Burr is a mere prop, a villainous foil, his personality an overblown caricature. He is portrayed as a man who lacks principles, unwilling to believe in, or fight for, anything that matters.

The historical Burr was no less passionate about the Revolution than Hamilton, eagerly joining the arduous 350-mile march through Maine wilderness to Canada in 1775. He was appointed aide-de-camp to General Richard Montgomery, who died during the invasion and lived on as a Revolutionary martyr. For courage under fire, Burr received a commendation from Congress. Contrary to the song lyrics, he wasn’t “waiting” for anything.

The men he later commanded admired him, and he believed in expanding democratic rights to uplift and empower poorer men. He was not pompous or aloof, nor a man of mere surfaces, nor a Chesterfieldian dandy, as his slanderous enemies pretended. His New York wing of the Jeffersonian party, the “Burrites,” were men of mixed class backgrounds, whereas the Schuyler-Hamilton Federalist faction was a top-down organization favoring elite interests. Falsely casting Burr as an aristocrat is a rhetorical ploy: It incorrectly shifts the blame for class prejudice onto him.

By taking sides in a mudslinging fight for power that goes back more than 200 years, Hamilton misses Burr’s actual contributions. He was a skilled innovator of democracy, working to make elections, financial services, and even the U.S. Senate more fair and transparent. In New York, he was charged with “revolutionizing the state,” because he backed progressive policies for funding internal improvements, debtor relief, and establishing a more democratic method of electing state senators. He founded the Manhattan Company, the first bank to extend financial services to ordinary merchants and mechanics outside the ruling elite. As vice president, he presided over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. His judicious behavior, which helped to maintain the impartiality of the judiciary, won him grudging praise from many Federalists; one called him “one of the best presiding officers I ever saw.” A man with sophisticated ideas, respected for his impartiality and scrupulous conduct—this Burr never appears in Hamilton.

An 1802 portrait of Aaron Burr by the painter John Vanderlyn.

 
Reducing Burr to a villain turns the musical into a lopsided morality tale, glossing over the complexity of early America in favor of characters we can cheer for. Thus hip-hop Hamilton unabashedly celebrates the American Dream; the conceit that the country has always been the land of opportunity. Hamilton represents the immigrant made good, because he was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Left out of the upbeat story is that Hamilton—and the Federalist Party he headed—were hostile to the idea that the United States should ever be led by newcomers. It was the Federalists who pressed for a constitutional amendment barring naturalized foreigners from elected offices, and it was that villain Burr, in the New York Assembly at the time, who gave an eloquent speech defending the liberal promise of the young republic. “America stood with open arms and presented an asylum to the oppressed of every nation,” he said. “Shall we deprive these persons of an important right derived from so sacred a source as our Constitution?”

The musical puts feminist words in the mouth of Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law, presuming she wanted to tell Jefferson to rewrite the Declaration to include women. This is absurd. In truth, Aaron Burr was far ahead of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams in advancing the ideas of English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the leading Enlightenment advocate of women’s rights. Burr and his wife Theodosia educated their daughter as they might have a son: She could read and write at the age of 3, then mastered French, Italian, Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, and geography. The idea that women were the intellectual equals of men was a radical one, and Hamilton attacked Burr for it, calling him a proponent of “Godwinism.” (William Godwin was Wollstonecraft’s husband.)

Finally, Hamilton wrongly claims that the duel with Burr was over the election of 1800, and that Burr knowingly shot Hamilton after he saw him fire a bullet in the air. Wrong again. The real cause of the duel was that Hamilton attacked Burr’s character (and refused to apologize) when Burr ran for the New York governorship in 1804. Conveniently missing is the fact that Hamilton supplied the pistols, and the one he used had a secret hair trigger. This gave him an unfair advantage and violated the gentlemanly code of conduct.

Can we expect a more accurate musical someday? Probably not. Interestingly, in times of political turmoil, the pop-culture pendulum often swings in a critical direction. In the 1930s, the iconoclastic painter Grant Wood (best known for his American Gothic) mockingly reworked the Parson Weems tale of George Washington, as the cherry tree slayer who would not lie. The same artist turned Paul Revere’s ride into a surreal jaunt through a fairytale town, with Revere astride a miniature rocking horse. Wood’s point was simple: In the midst of the Great Depression, bedtime stories about the founders were suitable for children but not adults. It was time for Americans to grow up and embrace their real history, a darker one. Gore Vidal did the same in 1973, when the breakdown of Nixon’s Watergate was in full sway, publishing Burr, a fictional history, in which Jefferson is savagely shown as a Janus-faced, dilettantish, ruthlessly power-hungry politician. In times of trouble, a little skepticism (and sarcasm) goes a long way.

Hamilton may be delight to watch, but let’s not convince ourselves that it honors the discipline of history. When he interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda, Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked: “I didn’t have to read the Bible, because I saw Jesus Christ Superstar.” That pretty much says it all. The musical Hamilton is to the historical Hamilton what Charlton Heston’s Moses is to … well, you get the picture.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly stated that Elizabeth Hamilton wanted to tell Jefferson to include women in the Declaration of Independence in the musical Hamilton. It was Angelica Schuyler, her sister.

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